Our Evil Secrets

The truth is we don’t have any secret sauces or magic wands that are going to “fix” your tax filings in ways that no other accounting firm CAN do. The real problem we see over and over again is that so many other tax preparers simply don’t take advantage of every tax saving strategy available. We can’t count the number of times we’ve been able to identify and fix strategic errors caused by trivially simple missed opportunities. In many cases significant amounts of money have been left in the government’s hands while the taxpayer is completely unaware that they have overpaid. Once we find and correct these errors, we can often put those overpaid taxes back in your pocket.

We cringe when someone tells us about the latest “Tax Shelter” they want to participate in, or that “their guy” knows some way to save them more tax than anyone else. The fact is that we can save so much money by simply planning properly and taking advantage of every available way to save tax that we don’t need to push any of the so-called grey areas. You will never have to worry about CRA coming back and auditing your money away. And we have a near-perfect track record with respect to audits by the CRA to prove it. In fact, over our entire existence, CRA audits have literally resulted in net refunds to our clients!

We stand in front of our work.

Whenever we’re not 100% sure about how to deal with certain rare situations that arise (no one knows the entire Tax Act), we will take the time to find out how to complete the work properly. It seems obvious to us that the best possible way to stay out of trouble with CRA and complete your taxes as optimally as possible involves getting it right the first time. Sometimes it’s frustrating, but we would rather delay than get it wrong.

We do our work with the highest possible level of integrity.

This isn’t always easy, because what you want and what CRA wants are usually diametrically opposed. So we focus on making sure your taxes are optimized without doing anything that would come back to haunt us in a subsequent audit. To this end, we avoid certain types of clients. If you’re uncertain about whether you’re on our Avoid List, you probably are; we aren’t going knowingly let you lie or cheat. Ever.

We stand behind our work.

When we do make a mistake that causes you a fine from CRA, we will pay the fine. To be very honest, it’s happened several times, and we just HATE paying them, but when it’s our fault we’re relatively happy to do it, because we feel quite strongly that even though no one is perfect, you shouldn’t have to pay for our mistakes.